Tag Archives: history

More than a crisis

Posted on February 4, 2019 by Mark English

Variations on the general theme that things ain’t what they used to be are often heard but rarely taken seriously. And, as a general rule, the older the speaker is, the less seriously the claims are taken. Of course he would say … Continue reading →

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Embrace doubt, reject certitude, and move past moral smugness

Posted on May 28, 2012 by David Hume

Noah Millman has a post up at The American Conservative, What Has Christianity To Do With Human Rights? He is responding to a conversation at the heart of which is Ross Douthat, who is making singular claims for the grounding … Continue reading →

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Conserving a non-existent past, revering radicalism’s forgotten

Posted on March 27, 2012 by David Hume

Recently I watched this Christian duet’s paean’s ode to Rick Santorum and was struck by the references to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. I am aware that Christian conservatives have a “Constitutionalist” focus, and often suggest that the … Continue reading →

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Dhimmitude and demise done well

Posted on September 26, 2010 by David Hume

Sometimes readers will ask about a good book on the history of religion, and I’m pretty hard-pressed to recommend something without qualification, caveat, or caution. But I can recommend The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the … Continue reading →

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Taking the Western side in religious history

Posted on September 17, 2010 by David Hume

A reader recently asked me about a history of Islam which did not exhibit the strong biases evident in Karen Armstrong’s body of work. I don’t know what to recommend really because I don’t read too many popular works of … Continue reading →

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On experts

Posted on August 31, 2010 by David Hume

On the Left right now they’re passing around a paper which suggests that immigration boosts median income. Since the modern American elite Left is pro-immigration they naturally take a shine to such papers, and my own impression from talking to … Continue reading →

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Having our way with the past, for it has no honor!

Posted on August 17, 2010 by David Hume

Ross Douthat’s new column, Islam in Two Americas is getting a lot of play. Douthat has to constrain his prose to make it suitable for a print column…I can almost see the excisions of nuance and subtly necessitated by the … Continue reading →

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How I learned to love moral relativism & cultural chauvinism

Posted on February 27, 2010 by David Hume

Over at Crunchy Con Rod Dreher points me to a new book, Paul Among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time, which, in Dreher’s words “attempts to defend St. Paul against his modernist critics (e.g. those … Continue reading →

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Christopher Beckwith against modernism

Posted on February 16, 2010 by David Hume

A few months ago I reviewed Empire’s of the Silk. I focused on the historical scholarship, but Lorenzo Warby puts the spotlight on the more normatively charge jeremiad against “modernism” interlaced throughout the book.

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Social cycles

Posted on February 14, 2010 by David Hume

An addendum to my comments on the posts on natalism. As I suggest below I think as a whole it is appropriate to model humans before 1800 as a conventional animal subject to Malthusian constraints. When a new crop (e.g., … Continue reading →

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